The former French minister emerged from a two-year legal ordeal to mount a long-shot bid to win the presidential nomination of France’s main center-right party.

Cleared of all suspicion but scarred by betrayals, the 51-year-old has few friends left in Les Républicains party, and is aiming his punches squarely at a former ally who failed to defend his name when it was being dragged through the mud: Nicolas Sarkozy.

“We never eliminated the 35 hours [work week under Sarkozy]. We never reformed the pension system. We never simplified the labor code. We never adopted a selective immigration policy,” Copé said in an interview at his office in the National Assembly. “In short, we never created the necessary conditions to improve competitiveness and bring down unemployment.”

While Copé did not mention Sarkozy by name, it was crystal clear who he was talking about.

Once close allies and political doppelgängers, the men had a spectacular falling out during the so-called Bygmalion Affair. It was during this complex campaign financing scandal that Copé was accused of having set up an accounting scam to cover cost overruns in Sarkozy’s 2012 campaign.

In a book published in January to coincide with his comeback (“Le Sursaut Français“, or the “French Upheaval”), Copé wrote that Sarkozy “denied” him a cabinet post that was his due after the 2007 election win.

As it turned out, being frozen out gave Copé one of his best weapons in the current race: freedom to criticize anything and everything that happened during the Sarkozy years.

The three other candidates in the race — Alain Juppé, Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet — were all members of Sarkozy’s cabinet and have to answer for part of his legacy, for better or worse.

“It [not having been a member of cabinet] gives me a form of distance and a freedom of expression that sets me apart from the others,” said Copé. “For the four other candidates it’s very difficult to say that none of this was their fault.”

What was their fault, said Copé, was letting France decline economically and lose almost all of its clout on the European stage. Asked about his record on economic reform, Sarkozy frequently says he was too busy fending off disaster during the global financial crisis.

For Copé, that’s not good enough.

“The crisis had serious consequences for our growth,” said Copé, who was budget minister under Jacques Chirac between 2004 and 2007. “But I observe that other countries, notably Germany, went through an even graver crisis, and they nevertheless managed to obtain much better results than we did thanks to structural reforms.”

In order to fix France and make its voice count once again in Europe, Copé prescribes a shock program of reform. His campaign slogan, “We retreat no more,” sets the tone: Copé, a World War I expert, wants to rule France via “ordinances” — direct orders that the government can issue after receiving authorization from parliament.

“I’ve got to a point in my life — and it has to do with the struggle I endured for a year and a half — where I believe that decisions have to be taken,” he said. “They must be taken right away, via ordinances, with much more time spent on the decision’s application than the decision itself.”

Long shot

Copé’s stance looks designed to represent the anti-Sarkozy. The former president, who now runs Les Républicains and is a close second in the polls behind Juppé for the party’s presidential nomination, has vowed that he will consult the French frequently via plebiscites if he is re-elected president.

For Copé, that amounts to a pledge of inefficacy.

“[Holding a referendum] is a way of not acting,” he said. “What does it mean? You get elected in May and in September you ask people to vote, again, in a referendum for a program that they voted for just four months earlier? It’s as if you were asking them for a chance not to carry out the reform.”

Copé knows his candidacy is a long shot. Having launched his campaign almost a year after the frontrunner, Juppé, he has a huge poll gap to make up. In late March, a survey by Ifop showed that Copé had just 2 percent support among right-wing voters, which places him dead last in the race.

There is also the question of Copé’s public image. After Sarkozy lost the 2012 election to François Hollande, Copé became embroiled in a lengthy fratricidal battle against ex-Prime Minister François Fillon for control over the party. Both men suffered as a result, appearing disloyal and obsessed with power.

Copé sees a way forward thanks to his outsider status. Fillon is not just linked to Sarkozy; he was a famously obedient prime minister who stayed in office for the full five-year presidential term. Juppé is the favorite by default who could collapse when the race heats up and other candidates start to hammer away at his legacy and age (70).

Whether the distinction of never having served under Sarkozy will be enough to catapult Copé into the lead remains to be seen.

The champion of a right-wing movement dubbed the “Uninhibited Right” (la Droite Décomplexée), Copé has at times misstepped politically. An attempt he made in 2012 to turn anti-white racism into a political issue, by claiming that white children were getting afterschool snacks torn from their hands during the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan, backfired spectacularly.

When asked about populism, and particularly the appeal of U.S. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, Copé said he was in favor of strong opinions and clear ideas as long as you back them up with action.

“If it’s a question of voicing your opinions, I do that, no problem,” he said. “But if you are being shocking only to win, and then you spend most of your time in office contradicting what you said during your campaign … I don’t think that’s the right way to do politics.”

It was another swipe at Sarkozy. The next step is getting him to punch back.